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Abstract

Medical terminologies and classification systems usually consist of a thesaurus of biomedical terms or concepts on one side and a set of relationships between them on the other side. The basic hierarchical link between thesaurus elements in most of these systems is the "is_a" relationship. Other widely used relationships are "part_of", "consist_of". They represent certain elements of knowledge about the respective conceptual domains. Medical knowledge, however, deals with more complex relations among concepts and entities.

To apply the potential of general medical knowledge on the huge amounts of health-related data (contained e.g. in electronic health record systems), knowledge and data have to be described in a way that allows semantic matching.

Existing classification systems are often of limited use for description of data that enter medical computational algorithms which represent more complex relations than traditional classifications and hierarchies. A semantically oriented Documentation Service has been proposed for Medigrid, a project that deals with such algorithms and data, to allow their unambiguous description and to provide a solid documentation base.

About the author

Adéla Jarolímková, graduated from the Institute of Librarianship and Information Studies, Faculty of Arts of Charles University. Since 1998 she has been working in the Scientific Medical Library of the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine, first as an information retrieval specialist, since 2000 as a head librarian. Currently she participates in project Medigrid.